BIOINFORMATICS AND SYSTEMS BIOLOGY/DATA MANAGEMENT CORE 1. MAIN OBJECTIVES AND NEW DIRECTIONS The Bioinformatics and Systems Biology/Data Management Core is an existing Core in the Cancer Center at BIMR. Similar cores exist at The Salk Institute and UCSD. In all three cases neuroscientists have limited or no access to these cores and have to rely of informal, personal links for bioinformatics and data management support. This NIH Neuroscience Blueprint Core Center Grant will make these facilities available to Neuroscientists on the La Jolla Torrey Pines Mesa. The Core will be headquartered at BIMR with satellite facilities, linked electronically, at The Salk and the UCSD Supercomputer facility. Director Dr. Adam Godzik is located at BIMR and Co-Director Gerhard Manning at The Salk Institute (both Godzik and Manning are members of the UCSD Supercomputer Facility and thus have access at UCSD as well). The mission of this Core is three-fold. First, the Facility will provide support and training for a set of over 100 publicly available informatics programs that can be used by neuroscientists. Second, the Facility will create a virtual environment for archiving, analyzing, and sharing data on specific proteins that are studied in individual laboratories that are part of this NIH Neuroscience Blueprint Center Core Grant. Similar to the "Cancer Molecule Pages Database" being developed by the Burnham Cancer Center, the "Neuroscience Molecule Pages database" will display many important aspects of individual proteins (sequence and structural information, involvement in biochemical pathways, and links to key papers published on the protein) involved in neurological diseases. Third, and most significantly, the Facility will generate integrated tools for archiving, analyzing, and disseminating information generated in four of the other Neuroscience Center Core Facilities: High Throughput Cell Analysis Facility, the Gene Analysis Facility, the Proteomics Facility and the Chemical Library Screening Facility. Each of these Facilities will generate massive volumes of data. The role of the Informatics Facility will be to establish automated methods of collecting and analyzing the data;and to generate query protocols (automated where possible) for probing the data sets to identify features of significance. It is the intent of the Facility to create a relational database where investigators can make simultaneous queries across data from all four Facilities, across data archived from individual laboratories, and information in the public domain (PubMed, USPTO, PDB etc.).